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The political world stopped for a moment when Speaker John Boehner broke into the jaunty old Disney tune — “My, oh my, what a wonderful day” — after a news conference during which he threw in the towel on the debt ceiling fight. He found himself trapped between the immovable object of Democrats determined they would never again let Republicans take the nation’s credit hostage and the irresistible force of a dysfunctional, crisis-addicted GOP majority of which he is the putative leader. Boehner decided to skip away in song.

Feb. 11, 2014, was, in fact, a wonderful day. It marked the end of a dismal experiment during which the right wing of the conservative movement did all it could to make the United States look like a country incapable of governing itself rationally. We were so caught up in our own nasty politics that we forgot we’re supposed to be a model for how democracy should work. There will be other episodes of foolishness, but the debt ceiling bomb has finally been defused.

Moreover, there were lessons here that should be applied from now on. The first is that refusing to negotiate over matters that should not be subject to negotiation in the first place is the sensible thing to do. President Obama learned this the hard way after the debilitating budget battle of 2011.

It’s true that both parties played political games around the debt ceiling in the past. But until our recent Tea Party turn, politicians always kept these symbolic skirmishes within safe limits. The 28 House Republicans who faced reality by voting to move on for another year sent a signal that they want to return to those prudent habits.

But this means that 199 Republicans voted to go over the cliff. Or, to be more precise, many pretended they were willing to take the leap to appease big conservative funders and organizations, knowing that a minority of their GOP colleagues and the Democrats would bail them out. These profiles in convenience included Reps. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the Budget Committee, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), who chairs the House Republican Conference.

This tells us something important: The House Republican majority now governs largely through gestures and is driven almost entirely by internal party fractiousness and narrow political imperatives. When Boehner tried to tie the debt ceiling vote to a popular proposal to restore modest cuts to military pensions, Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR), complained that he could not vote to raise the debt limit but also didn’t want to vote against the pension restoration.